I grew up spending days searching for fossils in the old rock walls of our farm, hours of turning over stones, developing an eye for the slight differences in their texture and shape that hinted at the ancient gifts each might hold and delighting at the surprises of lichens and insects that hid among them. That habit never really left me.

I paint landscapes that hover somewhere between the real and imaginary: layered, richly textured environments where earthly and dreamed places blur together. My process begins with playfulness. Beginning without a final image in mind allows me to begin laying down a history of pure feeling, intuition, and experimental marks, building up surfaces with collage, thick paint and transparent glazes, then scraping back, unearthing some of the story beneath. Observation and refinement follow, until each painting becomes the place it wanted to be.

For much of my life I worked in science and editing, disciplines that rewarded getting things exactly right. Painting has given me something I didn't know I was missing, the freedom to create without the handcuffs of perfectionism, and the ability to be in a continuous flow of asking and discovering the answer to the question, “What if?”

I want viewers of my paintings to feel like they're standing at the edge of somewhere almost familiar, a place they can't quite name but recognize anyway. Sometimes that place lives within.